


what am I supposed to do? what am I supposed to say?

by angelica_barnes



Series: ABC [1]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Astronomy, Cheating, Divorce, Giving Up, Multi, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-18
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-06-12 12:45:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15340137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelica_barnes/pseuds/angelica_barnes
Summary: A : ask, answer, accident, affairGwen knows Arthur loves Merlin. She knows he loves Merlin more than he could ever love her, his own wife.She knows Merlin doesn't mean to hurt her, doesn't mean for her to find out.She knows she's in love with the wrong man, and somehow loving him is worse than loving Arthur.(or, the truth about falling in love with the man your husband's cheating on you with.)





	what am I supposed to do? what am I supposed to say?

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from "Breakeven" by The Script

 

When she first sees Merlin Emrys with her husband, he doesn’t look like a threat.

I mean, Gwen’s always known that Arthur had a thing for guys. She didn’t care, still doesn’t, and it’s had no effect on their relationship whatsoever ever since they’ve been married, but now it might.

And she should’ve seen it.

Arthur is her sun, and she knows better than anybody what the stars in his eyes mean.

(Merlin Emrys is the moon that illuminates their lives, that sheds light on all their truths, and, finally, glows whenever Arthur smiles at him, and at this point Gwen thinks nothing of the twisting feeling in her gut.)

 

-

 

All she can do is stare.

Maybe she’s never seen Merlin as a threat, but despite everything she really never thought him the type to steal what doesn’t belong to him. I mean, she’s been Arthur’s since she met him, and she believes that Arthur’s been hers for just as long. Maybe she’s wrong. Maybe she isn’t. Whatever.

The point is, Merlin Emrys is kissing her husband with a passion she’s never seen before, and by the soft whimpers of his name slipping through Arthur’s lips, Gwen suspects it’ll soon evolve into something much more intimate.

She’d call it lust, but she’s not a blind woman, much as she acts like one at times - she never did see Merlin coming - and she knows that what she barely escapes from witnessing is what any outsider would call making love.

(Gwen knows love, knows it like the back of her hand and the inside of her head that she’s searched a million times with all five senses, and she knows that that would’ve been the moment to try and salvage whatever dying embers there were left of her marriage, but if one planet dies than the entire orbit falls apart, and if her sun was sad, then god forbid her world keep spinning.)

 

-

 

The next day, she sees Merlin at a local cafe. He smiles and waves, but she only stares. She never knew he was that beautiful, but she’s starting to see it now. The happiness on his face is quickly reduced to panic and worry as she takes too long to respond, and in an effort to make up for it, Gwen forgets all about her order and overbearing workload to plop down in the seat across from Merlin, and -

There it is, that smile again.

She tells herself the butterflies in her stomach are from nerves.

“Love is a funny thing, isn’t it?” She blurts, rubbing her palms together under the table, and suddenly Merlin’s expression goes blank.

He doesn’t seem to know what to say to her after that point, instead opting to drop his head and stare down into his tea. She wonders what he sees in there.

As she stands to leave, she hears, “Yes.” But he hasn’t moved, and so she passes it off as a trick of the mind, until three days later she realizes what he means.

(They always say earth’s axis is tilted, but she rather feels that it’s flipped upside down, and she’s barely holding on by the rotted branches of trees. She’d take Arthur’s hand but he’s too busy holding Merlin’s.)

 

-

 

It’s in bed that she asks him.

They’re lying side by side, as far apart as can be and facing away from each other, and finally she whispers the dreaded words.

“Why are you still here?”

She doesn’t want to ask him because then he’ll realize he has no reasons to. Maybe he already has.

There’s silence from Arthur, and then a soft-spoken answer.

“Am I?”

It’s too truthful for her heart to handle.

(Gwen’s always loved looking at the stars. She used to think they were people’s eyes, people like her grandma and father, buried in the ground but their souls had risen to the sky and the eyes were the windows to the soul. At fifteen, she met Arthur and realized that stars aren’t a sight, they’re a feeling.)

 

-

 

Arthur hands her the papers wordlessly. She wonders if Merlin knows. He’s singing loudly in the kitchen and she can practically feel his joy as it’s shaking the floors of her once empty house; she cracks a smile.

She signs the papers without a fight, and gives Arthur her ring as a reminder that love isn’t blind. Sometimes it just isn’t real.

(Merlin Emrys has too many souls for just two eyes to show, so Gwen thinks she couldn’t possibly know him too well. He floats on clouds whereas she meditates at the bottom of the ocean, and Arthur is the sky that holds a giggling Merlin in his arms, all soft and blissed-out from love.)

 

-

 

When Arthur packs his bags, Merlin’s there for all of it. He’s kind enough not to kiss the blonde in front of Gwen, but she can feel his longing. His yearning, his want and need, and she’d say he reeks with it but he actually smells quite lovely, like roses.

She’s quiet as they load the bags into the car, and heads back up to the apartment before they’ve even shut the trunk.

Merlin follows her up and catches her wrist.

“I’m sorry,” he says earnestly, voice breaking like he wants her to believe he means it, and she just nods tiredly. Without thinking, she kisses him, and he goes stiff beneath her frown.

“You should be,” she exhausts the phrase that’s been echoing inside her head for the past year like something halfway between a plea and a mantra. “But not for him.”

She leaves him on the steps, one foot up and one down, and she closes her eyes as she closes her apartment door. At least she’s given him something to mull over as the last words they’ll ever say to one another. She wants him to think. To think about how love is funny.

But also, funny enough, she finds she can’t laugh.

(Merlin Emrys is a mystery, a long-lost soul, a forgotten planet or a black hole, and Gwen knows that he and Arthur make up the star-crossed lovers whereas she is the constellations, the open air beneath the boys’ feet and the oxygen in their lungs so that they may breathe for just a little longer without pulling back from one another’s lips.)

 

-

 

Happiness is a funny thing, she finds, as funny as she once thought love was.

Looking back on it now, she knows she could’ve never seen Merlin Emrys as a threat the first time she saw him with her husband.

Because a threat requires something to threaten in the first place, and she can finally accept, gazing across the square to where Merlin hangs off Arthur’s arm and laughs at something he’s said, that she was always the one with someone who didn’t belong to her.

(The sun and the moon and the earth orbit around each other with a need misunderstood by men and women alike. The earth needs the moon much more than the moon will ever need the earth, and the sun watches fondly with a smile the chase. He knows there is no threat from the green and blue lady who lives on slightly tilted.)

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> i hope i've portrayed them somewhat correctly? i've never watched the show but i'm in love with the characters so I thought i'd give it a try.


End file.
